Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Messages: Barack Obama and Post-Racial Politics

Spectator (Journal of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematics Arts)
Volume 30, Number 2 (Fall 2010)
pages 9-17

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

The election of President Barack Hussein Obama marks an important milestone in United States racial politics. Many cultural critics and opinion leaders argue that Obama’s popularity and position represent post-racial accomplishments for the nation.

In this article I argue that post-racial politics, the ideology that race and/or racism is dead, ignores the salient fact that we continue to live in a society deeply influenced by race, with material consequences that affect life chances. I support this argument through an examination of Obama’s racial rhetoric in the address of March 18, 2008 “A More Perfect Union.” Through Obama’s uses of mixed race identity, the speech acknowledges the actual history of racial injustice and the ideal future of racial reconciliation through frank deliberation and political intervention, and thus serves as a prologue to racial dialogue rather than a post-racial epilogue or monologue.

The 21st century has ushered in a set of paradigm shifts that are responding to changes in technology, economics, politics, cultural flows, and narratives of identification. From the advent of social media, to the Great Recession, to health care reform, to the revised racial categories on the U.S. Census, American lives are faced with increasing tensions and ambiguities. No single icon reflects these tensions and ambiguities, and the paradigm shifts they are inspiring, more cohesively than President Barack Obama.

Some critics argue that Obamas election to the Presidency and status as global “supercelebrity” are signs that we have entered a post-racial moment in which everyone and everything is mixed. “Watching Obama campaign with his African American wife, his Indonesian-Caucasian half-sister, his Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law…all of their children,” not to mention the memories of his Kenyan father and white American mother and grandparents from Kansas, is evidence of this mixed, and ultimately post-, racial moment. Census statistics support this view, revealing that the population of multiracial children in the United States has soared from approximately 500,000 in 1970 to more than 6.8 million in 2000, and that they are happier than their mono-racial counterparts.

As a result of this mixing, many now question the existence of racial prejudice and discrimination writ large. In a recent interview with CNNs John King, President Obama was asked about the role he thinks race and racism play in his political reception. The President suggested that while racism exists, it lives more so in our imaginations than our intentions. If post-racial proponents are interpreting Obamas words and images correctly, then we may be on the verge of entering an era in which discriminatory racial barriers, partisan emotions and divisiveness have been dismantled. Put bluntly, in post-racial America, racism will be dead. If post-racial proponents are incorrect, then our dream of a post-racial America is a myth that both constrains and contains an ongoing drama concerning multiracialism, identity, and Obamas ability to change national public policy. In either case Obama is, as Peggy Orenstein claims, our emblematic “mixed messenger.” In the pages that follow I will engage post-racial politics by asking and answering three questions: What does post-race mean? How does Obamas racial rhetoric address a post-race perspective? And, what are the implications of Obama’s iconic racial status for U.S. racial politics?…

…In this article I argue that post-racial politics, the ideology that race and/or racism is dead, ignores the salient fact that we continue to live in a society deeply influenced by race, with material consequences that affect life chances. I support this argument through an examination of Barack Obamas racial rhetoric in his address of March 18, 2008—”A More Perfect Union”—perhaps the most climactic moment of his first Presidential campaign…

…In addition, those of African ancestry were the subjects of pseudo-scientific racist studies concluding they were soulless beasts, a threat to civilization itself, a drain on the economy, and a generally cursed people. These sinister images became the basis for a biological theory known as “hybrid degeneracy,” which claimed that mixed race people were emotionally unstable, irrational, recalcitrant, and sterile. According to Robyn Wiegman, this theory became a biological fact in Western discourse based on pseudo-scientific observation and comparative anatomy, especially of the brain, skull, and reproductive organs. As a result of these sociological and pseudo-scientific findings, white/European Americans were instructed to dissociate from African Americans in social life in order to maintain their purity. It is therefore unsurprising that blacks and whites who dared to cross the color line in any way, whether to attend school, vote, or mix with one another romantically, were the subjects of torture and abuse. Such physical and juridical policing of the color line is why the study of mixed race identification remains important to any discussion of racial and post-racial politics. Moreover, those of mixed race who passed as either white or black demonstrated that the color line promoted suffering on both sides and in the spaces in-between, making it at the same time all too real and extremely unstable…

Read the entire article here.